National Poetry Month: Home

 

Photo credit: Erika Schultz/The Seattle Times.

 

Rena Priest is serving as the Washington poet laureate from 2021-2023.

Priest’s literary debut, Patriarchy Blues, was honored with the 2018 American Book Award, and her most recent work is Sublime Subliminal. A member of the Lhaq’temish (Lummi) Nation, she is the first Indigenous poet to assume the role. She succeeds poets Claudia Castro Luna (2018-2021), Tod Marshall (2016-2018), Elizabeth Austen (2014-2016), Kathleen Flenniken (2012–2014), and Sam Green (2007–2009).

THE ANCESTORS

“Physicists Find Way To ‘See’ Extra Dimensions”

–sciencedaily.com, February 4, 2007

 

There were 10 dimensions.

In ours, we opened an envelope

and the message inside changed.

In his dimension it stayed the same.

He came back. They all did.

No. They never left. We’re all here—

have always been here.

In-fact, we’ve run out of room.

We stack up on each other

like letters in a mailman’s satchel,

or a frame of film threaded on a spool.

We don’t know it while we’re here.

The whole story is already writ.

Meanwhile, a little backlit machine

is over there talking to itself. It says

“There used to be 10 dimensions.

Now there are only 7… Oh, excuse me.

There are 23, plus-one every second.”

In this one, I am an ancestor.

In the next, a descendant.

- Rena Priest